Microsoft announced the retirement of Visual Studio for Mac.
The announcement reads that the latest version of Visual Studio for Mac 17.6 will continue to receive support for an additional 12 months until August 31, 2024, and provide service updates for security issues and Apple's updated platform.
The specific policy is that starting August 31, 2024, Visual Studio for Mac will no longer receive any support. At that time, Visual Studio for Mac will only provide legacy installations to users who have subscribed to Visual Studio through my.visualstudio.com, but will no longer provide service or maintenance.
Technical support will continue to be available until August 31, 2024, provided a support agreement exists.
Microsoft said that although they have decided to retire Visual Studio for Mac, they will still provide alternatives for Mac developers, such as the recently released C# Dev Kit for VS Code and other extensions.
In the future, the development team will focus on enhancing Visual Studio and VS Code , optimizing them for cross-platform development. No new frameworks, runtimes, or language support will be added in Visual Studio for Mac. However, for the next 12 months, they will continue to provide necessary updates, such as service updates for critical bug fixes, security issues, and Apple's updated platform. Additionally, runtime and workload updates will continue to be provided so that developers can continue to build and distribute applications built on .NET 6, .NET 7, and the Mono framework.
While not officially supported, Microsoft has also enabled basic support for .NET 8 in Visual Studio for Mac for building and debugging applications. They hope that through these commitments, and investment in alternatives, disruptions to Mac workflows can be minimized.
Here are the alternatives Microsoft offers for Visual Studio for Mac:
- Visual Studio Code + C# Dev Kit, and other related extensions
- Start the virtual machine on Mac (or cloud host) to run Windows, and then run Visual Studio in Windows